


Mortarion

by moreagaara



Series: The Emperor Revived [14]
Category: Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Aggression, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood Magic, Cross-Post, Cross-Posted on deviantArt, Deviates From Canon, Disease, Emperor Revived, Fanfiction, Flashbacks, Gap Filler, Gen, Graphic Depictions of Illness, Hate, Hatred, Illnesses, Laughing Sickness, Literature, Love/Hate, Major Illness, Mental Link, Mild Blood, Necromancy, Originally Posted Elsewhere, Originally Posted on deviantART, Post-Canon, Science Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Self-Hatred, Sickness, Supernatural Illnesses, Talking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-16
Updated: 2020-04-16
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:34:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23686240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moreagaara/pseuds/moreagaara
Summary: Is a very grumpy man and one who can't let go of his hate.Peep ownership:Games Workshop:  WH40k and relatedMe:  the writing and the Emperor's name
Series: The Emperor Revived [14]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1447444
Kudos: 11





	Mortarion

**Author's Note:**

> Is a very grumpy man and one who can't let go of his hate.
> 
> Peep ownership:  
> Games Workshop: WH40k and related  
> Me: the writing and the Emperor's name

On the one hand, Nurgle was smiling when Mortarion returned. On the other hand, Nurgle was always smiling. Mortarion knew better than to try and read real happiness into his patron’s expression; he had, after all, failed to either kill the resurrected Guilliman or bring him into Nurgle’s diseased fold. For his own part, Mortarion would have much preferred to simply return immediately to the Plague Planet he hadn’t bothered to name without spending any time in his patron’s garden, but long experience had taught him that he had better present himself. Especially after a failure.

Mortarion drew a deep breath in through his rebreather—the poisonous and vile scent it contained fortifying him—as his eyes flicked, briefly and like always, towards the chained and incessantly whispering Eldar woman near his patron’s rusted cauldron. The one truly beautiful thing Mortarion felt existed in the palace, not that he would ever say as much to anyone who served Nurgle. He didn’t particularly want to interrupt his patron’s careful crafting of some new plague, but stepped forward anyway. Immediately, Nurgle withdrew some of his blood (how Mortarion still had any was beyond his ken, considering the sheer number of plagues infesting his body) and swirled it into his cauldron. Soon after, he seemed satisfied with the result and fed a sample of it to the Eldar woman; she died, like always, but came back, just like always.

“Three hours and ten minutes,” Mortarion said. Privately he hoped the Eldar was building up some sort of resistance to his blood; he knew it was a ridiculous notion—Nurgle didn’t tolerate such silly things as resistances to his best plagues—but it was nice to nurture the occasional hope. He twitched a tattered wing out of the way of a freshly born Nurgling while he watched his patron; hopefully this batch was good enough.

It wasn’t. Nurgle swallowed the entire cauldron, and Mortarion couldn’t help his distasteful grimace at the display. “Good of you to join me, Death Lord,” Nurgle smiled, belching at the same time. “I made a gift for you while you were away,” he informed his Daemon Prince, delight in his every tone, and fetched down a vile full of some noxious fluid that reeked even through the glass and even above the rest of the garden.

Mortarion knew better than to refuse; if he tried, Nurgle would simply force him to hold still by his control over the diseases ravaging his body and force both his gift and several others he invented on the spot down his throat. He also knew better than to ask what it was; he would find out soon enough, and Nurgle was entirely too fond of describing exactly what his new disease did in gory detail. Instead, he silently accepted the vial and drank the fluid within while trying to not breathe. A moment later, the vial shattered on the ground next to Mortarion, having fallen from nerveless fingers; Mortarion hit the ground on his knees soon after, doubled over and paralyzed by laughter, of all things.

It wasn’t the first time one of Nurgle’s gifts had wrenched control of Mortarion’s body away; it was part of why Mortarion detested his patron’s visits. It was, however, the first time that Mortarion could do nothing whatsoever to combat the new disease’s symptoms and regain control. No matter what he did, the insane giggles wouldn’t stop for more than half a second; no matter what he did, his lips wouldn’t unlock from a crazed grin. For a moment, his eyes fell upon the captured Eldar woman, a plea for help within them—

_—souls mixed with the essence of plumeria and the scales of an Urquhart—_

Nurgle was helping him stand up, almost kindly. Hatred seethed within Mortarion, but he quickly squashed it before his patron could sense it and give him another gift. “I thought your demeanor could use a little improvement,” Nurgle noted, as one of his pustules burst and gave rise to another Nurgling. “How are you feeling?” Mortarion couldn’t manage speech past the laughter, and wouldn’t have trusted himself not to dole out a choice helping of imaginative swears if he could. Instead, he silently gave his patron a thumbs up. _I’m doing great, thanks so much for asking!_ he thought towards Nurgle, keeping the sarcasm and fury to himself. He could nurture those in private, on his Plague Planet. Nurgle, thankfully, noticed nothing of Mortarion’s real emotions and allowed him to leave; Mortarion had to force himself to walk away, rather than sprint or attempt to fly.

Finally—finally!—he was far enough away from the edge of his patron’s territory that he could do both. It took time and effort to get airborne—honestly, he shouldn’t have been able to manage the feat at all, considering the state of his wings—but once flying, he could make his slow, ponderous way towards his Plague Planet, and the castle he had built at the top of its tallest peak.

Exactly where the Monster—his adoptive father—had built his own castle ages ago. Exactly the same design as the fortress said adoptive father had raised him in, down to the paint on the walls and the design of the carpets. He didn’t even need to dismiss the Plague Marines guarding it; they were already moving the moment they heard his constant laughing, knowing how much their Primarch hated to be disturbed after receiving a new gift. By the time Mortarion landed, the halls were silent but for his echoing giggles.

First he strode to the base of the fortress—the place where his adoptive father had begun to teach him to resurrect corpses, before Mortarion had escaped his clutches—and feverishly concocted twelve new plagues for the Imperium. Most of them either didn’t spread well (as they killed too quickly) or weren’t severe enough for anyone to seek easement from Nurgle; even so, they should do to make his patron leave him be for a while. He summoned Nurglings to carry samples of them back to Nurgle and others to carry the rest out to his Plague Marines. One of them carried a message, a suggestion he make a thirteenth plague in honor of the most recently completed Black Crusade; Mortarion obeyed rather than argue.

He put some thought into it; a fungus, he decided, that would spread across a planet without symptoms until every living thing was infected. Then it turned deadly, painful, and—Mortarion’s favorite part—opened a psyker’s soul to the Warp and to Nurgle specifically. While it was dormant, it was near impossible to detect; while active, it was near impossible to fight. The Nurgling smiled, died, and mutated into a Great Unclean One before Mortarion’s eyes. He wheezed in between bouts of laughter at the particular diseases this daemon carried, only half listening to its praises for his cleverness. _My pleasure,_ he thought at it once it was done, mostly meaning the psyker part.

Then the Unclean One was gone, and Mortarion was alone again. He could only laugh more as he made his way up to his old room in the fortress-castle, and collapsed on his old bed. Laugh, and dash his tears away with one rotten and pustule-ridden hand. He knew better than to try calling for his mother or father. They wouldn’t come.

He didn’t need them anyway.

~~*~~

_The pod had landed on something soft, and it took a long time to roll to a stop. It took even longer for the infant inside to unlatch its door—at first he had waited inside, wailing, in the hopes that someone would hear him and come help—but eventually he managed. At least there was a way for him to open the door from the inside. The moment he pushed the door open, however, he stopped wailing a moment to cough wildly; something in his chest clinched shut automatically, and for a moment he could only take short, shallow breaths of the yellowish air surrounding him. Once he had mastered this new way of breathing, he opened his eyes and finally realized what it was he was standing on._

_Corpses. Thousands of them, most of them fresh. Instinctively, he reached out to the nearest; something stirred in his chest and arm, but he had another coughing fit before anything could happen. Then he scolded himself; what was he expecting to happen? The corpse to magically come back to life? Sit up, hold his hand, and take him somewhere safe? Instead, he screamed for his parents; they had to be nearby. Mama, in particular, would not be far from a field of death this big._

_They didn’t come, but someone else did. They were dressed in black robes and a silvery chestplate, with patterns in a strange design the infant couldn’t recognize. There were other people behind him, bearing an assortment of arms and armor; they were strangely silent, and looked oddly unhealthy. The child hesitated, but turned away; he wanted his parents, not some stranger._

_It didn’t matter. The stranger stepped forward, heedless of the dead beneath his feet, and scooped the infant up; the child stilled instantly, more shocked at the stranger’s audacity than anything else. He was about to scream again when the stranger spoke: “I think I’ll name you Mortarion.” Then he passed the child off to one of the people following him, and the child—Mortarion—realized that the person holding him was just as dead as the people he had fallen on._

~~*~~

In the present, Mortarion awoke. He wanted to growl, but his time asleep had not banished the laughing fit or his rictus grin. His dream-memory haunted him as he stalked the halls of his fortress; he logically worked through the rest of it rather than risk another night dreaming of his past again. The foul man who had kidnapped him had been all right, he supposed, as fathers went. His adoptive father _had_ taught Mortarion everything he’d wanted to know: history, small pieces of arcana, anatomy, warfare, strategy, anything and everything Mortarion wanted to know about.

Except for one thing: who the people in the valleys between the mountains were. Why they didn’t come up into the mountains like his father and his friends. If they were so helpless, why his father or his friends didn’t help or protect them. Why his father insisted they were beyond help, and why his father kept changing the subject whenever Mortarion pressed him. So Mortarion left. He had meant to do so without hurting any of his guardians—his gaolers, in reality—but most of them had left him no choice. Once he had to hurt them, he meant to leave them be once he had broken them enough they could not follow, but the reanimated corpses understood only that their charge was leaving, and that they had to stop him. Mortarion had no choice but to end their existence.

His breathing grew easier the further down the mountain he went; all he wanted, he assured himself, was to see the creatures his adoptive father insisted were unworthy of aid. From there, he could decide for himself if what his adoptive father said was true; if it was, then he would return to the fortress and ask no further questions about them.

Finally, the yellow clouds around him parted into clean air. Mortarion’s eyes watered at the sudden lack of sulfurous fumes, and he coughed at the sudden unclenching in his chest and the much deeper breaths he took as a result. He managed to stay standing, but the noise had attracted the attention of the creatures of the valley, who surrounded him in a loose semi-circle with what weapons they had to hand.

Mortarion gave into the laughing for a moment, leaning against a wall for support. The moment he had discovered that his adoptive father had lied to him had been the moment he understood that psykers—like his adoptive father and his warlord friends—were the true scourge of his planet, rather than the creatures in the valleys. The moment his eyes had cleared enough that he could see without the yellowish haze, he had seen that the creatures were humans. Just like him. Not, however, like the Monster that called itself his father. In that moment, Mortarion had held up his hands in surrender—his adoptive father had not allowed him to keep any of the weapons he’d trained with, and had even gone so far as to keep all the knives in the fortress under lock, key, and heavy guard—and spoken to the villagers. “I’m Mortarion. I’m here to help you,” he’d said, startled for a moment by the unusual lack of strength and resonance in his voice, but good enough at controlling himself that nothing showed outwardly.

They hadn’t believed him. Mortarion didn’t blame them; he looked like a necromancer, after all. He was thin and pale like they were, and he even wore their robes; moreover, they had to have heard statements like that before. Even so, they allowed him to stay in a rotten barn at the edge of the village, and they allowed him to grow a small patch of crops for himself. They would accept no gifts or offers of help from him (sensible), and they would not help him unless he specifically asked (understandable).

A week later, the village came under attack. Not from the Monster, but from a younger necromantic warlord; one his adoptive father had frequently called “upstart” and other, less charitable words. The villagers left Mortarion to fend for himself, but did attempt to band together and save each other…but to no avail. The warlord’s minions were too good at fighting for the villager’s weapons to do any lasting harm, even on the rare occasions they managed a hit. Mortarion didn’t think twice; the nearest building to him wasn’t locked, and contained a variety of harvesting tools.

The nearest of them was a harvesting scythe nearly as large as Mortarion himself, and it felt _right_ in his hands the second he picked it up. It didn’t matter that he had never trained to use such an implement; it was as though he already knew the best possible way to use it. When he left the building, he tore through the warlord’s forces as though they were wheat to be cut down and bound up for storage. It took no effort whatsoever to stop the scythe whenever a villager got within its range, and barely any to change its direction to the enemies he wished to strike down. Within minutes, the warlord’s forces were destroyed, and the warlord himself was retreating into the fog.

 _Go ahead and run,_ Mortarion had thought as he charged into the fog after him. _It changes nothing._ The necromancer’s smile had faltered when he saw that Mortarion didn’t immediately fall in the poisonous fog, and had turned to horror when he saw that Mortarion wasn’t troubled by it in the slightest. He had begged for his life when Mortarion raised his ichor-streaked scythe to kill him, even going so far as to promise Mortarion anything in return.

Mortarion, for his part, had obliged him. The one thing he wanted from the warlord was his head, unattached to his shoulders. Pity the man hadn’t lived through the process, or Mortarion would have kept his end of the bargain; instead, he took the head and carried it back to the villagers, dropping it in the mud where it belonged while he went to locate cleaning supplies for his scythe.

They trusted him after that. They trusted him enough that they spread word to the other valleys that a protector had come; Mortarion soon proved himself a teacher as well, as he had taught them all how to defend themselves. He taught them how to fight against the necromantic minions in particular, and then he taught the smiths and artisans how to create suits of armor that would protect the toughest among them in the fog so that they could chase the psykers down and butcher them as well. He taught his Death Guard—the strongest, the toughest, the most stubborn of his followers—how to climb up to the fortresses when the psykers started to refuse to come anywhere near the valleys where they knew Mortarion was, and he worked to improve their armor so that they could climb higher and higher.

Eventually, only one fortress was left. The one fortress that even Mortarion could not reach unaided. The fortress where his adoptive father—the Monster—lived. On his Plague Planet, Mortarion managed to ease himself to his knees, now laughing at his own stupidity. If he had discarded his lingering feelings for the Monster and gone ahead with the attack, the Emperor would have had nothing to bargain with, and Mortarion could have made him leave. But because he had yet harbored some lingering affection for the monster that had raised him, and because he did call off the attack and declare that he could rot in his fortress, and because the Emperor had shown up in Mortarion’s home village…

He didn’t want to admit jealousy. Mortarion had needed to work for the villagers’ approval, and here was this stranger who simply appeared—just as Mortarion had—promised salvation and help—just as Mortarion had—and been accepted—just as Mortarion very much hadn’t. Though if he _had_ been jealous (which he hadn’t been), it would have explained his aggression towards the stranger when he tracked him down in conference with the elders of his village.

“We don’t need your help. Leave,” Mortarion spoke with a clipped, angry tone. The stranger didn’t move.

“All I’m saying is that it seems that you and your Death Guard are having a little trouble with the last necromancer, friend,” the stranger replied in a much more casual tone; Mortarion bristled at the inference that he and the stranger were on so much as speaking terms. “But I’ll tell you what. If you can prove me wrong—if you can defeat the last warlord without my help—I’ll go away, like you ask. But if for some reason you can’t manage to defeat him, then you have to swear fealty to me.” 

Mortarion left to face his foster father the very next day, and he went alone in spite of his Death Guards’ protests. He didn’t want any of his people to see him fall, or to see him unable to kill the final monster that tormented them. Privately, he rather doubted he would even reach the top of the mountain through the thick, poisonous fog; even the best toxin-filtering armor only allowed him to climb another thousand feet above the point he could breathe unaided, and his adoptive father’s fortress was two thousand feet higher than that. More than once on the path upwards, he heard someone following him, but rather than waste energy worrying about it, he focused on the climb. He paused for a moment at the point where the armor could no longer protect him and considered his options.

No one would ever respect or follow him again if he turned back now, and he wouldn’t want them to. No one was with him, so no one would know if he simply failed to reach the fortress; he would simply never return, which—he decided upon reflection—was probably what the stranger wanted. It was smart, after all; challenge the person who had actually put in the work to save a world to an impossible task, and then reap the reward when they naturally failed. Hells, the stranger had probably been sent by his foster father just to get rid of him.

He snarled and started climbing up the narrow, winding path to the fortress. His foster father could at least look him in the eyes while he died. _Honorless craven psyker,_ he thought, among other more terrible things, while he climbed. It wasn’t long before he had to lean on his scythe for support, or before he was coughing from the fumes in the atmosphere. He wasn’t getting enough air; he paused briefly to force his chest to unclench itself to get more. It helped, but the coughing worsened and started to sound wet. He climbed faster. At the very least, he would make it to his father’s doorstep before he collapsed. Even if he had to do so without protection, because his armor had begun to rot. Even if he couldn’t so much as say a word, because the acidic bile in his throat threatened to take his voice.

In the end, he still had armor and voice left when he reached the fortress, but he had no strength left to even stand. He could, however, shout his hatred of his father up at the gate and over the walls, so that hopefully the entire planet could hear him. Everything his father had ever said, everything he’d done, was so terrible that nothing could ever make up for it. But if his father came out and faced his doom, maybe the universe could start to forgive him, even if Mortarion never would. The coughing was much worse for Mortarion’s suppression of it throughout his vitriol, and lasted far longer than it should have done from his attempting to keep it quiet, so the fortress couldn’t hear. He would show nothing but strength—fading as it was—to his adoptive father.

The Monster was frowning when the gates finally opened and he stepped out. Mortarion couldn’t manage to even shift himself off his knees. He collapsed forward, finding the ground with one hand while his other stubbornly gripped his scythe; the ground spun around the point where he touched it. He could manage to look up, and found that the entire world was spinning around the man he had called father, whose face was etched with the same disappointment he had worn when Mortarion had been a child and failed some simple task, who bore a coldly gleaming iron sword in one hand, and who had only one thing to say: “None of this would have happened if you hadn’t left.”

Time slowed down. His father raised the sword—moving easily, despite the sulfurous fog surrounding them—and began to swing at Mortarion’s neck. Someone bellowed denial behind them both; Mortarion’s father hesitated for just an instant. The stranger appeared, vaulting over Mortarion’s fallen body; he held a sword of his own, and it gleamed with gold and fire. Mortarion tried to stop him—no one was going to kill his adoptive father other than himself!—but only managed to topple onto his side. His father shifted to meet this new threat, but the stranger simply batted his sword to the side—it flew off the side of a cliff and clattered against the mountain, the sound oddly loud in Mortarion’s memory—and thrust his own sword into the necromancer’s heart.

Mortarion’s eyes were closing by the time the stranger withdrew his sword. He was unconscious by the time his father’s lifeless body hit the ground. He knew nothing of what passed between that moment and waking up on an unfamiliar bed, in a clean white room, with a breathing mask strapped to his face.

Remembered fury allowed Mortarion to twist the insane grin he wore into a grimace, and then to open his mouth and roar his _hatred_ of the Emperor for the entire Eye to hear. The one thing he had wanted—to destroy his foster father on his own terms—and the Emperor had taken it away from him! And then, despite his honeyed, soothing words that he meant to free humanity of psykers, he had made full use of them in the beginning of the Crusade, right up until the Council of Nikaea that had _finally_ bound them properly and forced them to live like the rest of humanity they would have tormented given half a chance.

Moreover, the Emperor had himself made use of Warp-tech, even knowing Mortarion’s feelings on the subject. The Throne, Malcador’s staff, likely the very armor the Emperor himself wore, all of it foul Warp-tech. For the greater good, Mortarion’s pox-ridden ass. His roar ended; for a second, Mortarion gasped for breath and needed to take several in through his respirator, but once he had recovered—and the laughter recommenced—a real grin split his lips. It would be great fun to make a plague that fed itself on the Imperium’s faith in the Emperor. The more faith one had, the more it would affect the person who carried it: those without real faith would be asymptomatic carriers, and those with real faith…well. Total organ failure—starting with the least vital organs, so the victim had plenty of time to turn to Grandfather Nurgle for help—would do for them.

What felt like weeks passed as Mortarion tinkered with the disease he named Faith Eater, but time was fluid in the Eye. He hardly noticed the continued undercurrent of laughter, so focused was he on his work. Something shuddered in the Warp, almost knocking an entire beaker of precious extract from some rare flower into his disease; likely the Thousand Sons were wrecking something again. Mortarion ordered his Plague Marines to attack them on basic principle. Perhaps a drop of the extract…there. It was ready.

Best to test it on a Shrine World; perhaps Ophelia VII, since that would also cripple the Adepta Sororitas. But with his Plague Marines occupied, and Mortarion unwilling to entrust this particular plague to the Great Unclean Ones directly…he attempted to sigh, but only managed to hiccup between bouts of laughter. Removing his armor these days was a distasteful experience at best, but at least he could do it, unlike Angron or other Chaos-sworn marines.

He pulled one glove off with a sharp jerk; bare muscle and bone greeted him, and his blood flowed sluggishly blackish-green where the armor—more akin to an exoskeleton covered over with a thin layer of skin—had connected. He continued stripping the armor off until he reached his shoulder; what flesh remained on his frame was bloated, and either sagged off his bones, or was taut with pus or other, more unspeakable fluids. His laughter turned helpless again as he repeated the process for his other arm, then his legs, and finally his torso. The story was the same everywhere he looked; it didn’t matter that he felt no pain, in Mortarion’s opinion.

Briefly he wondered what his foster father would think to see him now. Maybe he would be proud, since he finally had the son and heir he’d tried to groom Mortarion to be; maybe he would be just as disgusted with him as Mortarion was with himself. It hadn’t been Mortarion’s doing, after all, to look the way he did…and for all his flaws and hidden monstrosity, his foster father had always looked human. Mortarion considered, as he pulled his own wings off—they would grow back once he re-entered the Warp—that his foster father was probably a worse monster than he was, simply because he looked so normal. His creator—the Emperor—was no different than his foster father in that regard. In fact, the Emperor was worse than his foster father, because the Emperor had said all the right things and then done whatever he wanted. For the greater good. Always.

Mortarion sucked in a deep breath before he ripped the respirator off his face; coughing immediately shook him, rattling his bones and making his diseased flesh jiggle in places that flesh was not meant to move. When he finally managed to breathe past the coughing and chuckling, he managed a single word: “Fulgrim.”

Immediately a chaotic fetish appeared on the table before him, carved of human bone and strung on a single long strip of human skin, along with an intense feeling of revulsion from his deranged brother. Mortarion put it on quickly, and the illusion contained within it took full effect; even to Mortarion’s own touch, he was covered in healthy skin, marred only by the occasional pockmark. Both the coughing and the laughter remained, but Mortarion supposed that Fulgrim wasn’t familiar enough with Nurgle’s latest gift to hide the laughing. The cough was beyond both of them, since it hadn’t been caused by Chaotic sorcery or Nurgle’s power, but by simple physics.

The Emperor had offered to heal him completely when he had woken up, all those ages ago in the ship’s infirmary. Mortarion had refused him, wanting a reminder of his failure, so the Emperor had designed and built a respirator that supplied him with a low dose of the poison he’d spent most of his youth inhaling. Neither of them ever spoke of the incident again, at least not to each other. Mortarion had overheard the Emperor talking about it to Malcador on Terra at one point; Malcador had counseled him to let Mortarion have his damage, if that’s what he wanted. Mortarion had been tempted to barge in and punch the insolent psyker in the face. Instead, he had saved it for when he learned of the existence of the Golden Throne. 

Mortarion paused, then shook his head. No use dwelling on the past; he had a job to do. First, he infected himself with his own Faith Eater, and carried several vials more to taint Ophelia VII’s water supply. Then he translocated himself to the planet, in a private area that no one was watching, and finally he allowed himself to be discovered by the local priest.

He was an Imperial Trooper, he said between bursts of giggles, and he had been afflicted by the Laughing Pox—some new creation of the Archenemy—so his superiors had sent him here for recovery. The priest was certainly taken in by his story, and reassured him that the Emperor would protect him from whatever Chaos sorcery had caused his affliction, even as Mortarion’s laughter grew louder from sheer incredulity which the priest fortunately interpreted as a natural progression of his illness. The priest still led him to one of the smaller temples—just under a mile high and half a mile broad at the base—and placed him in one of the sickrooms. He would call the Emperor immediately, the priest said, since his disease was new.

The priest left, and Mortarion part wondered and part scoffed at the priest’s words. For a start, the Emperor couldn’t leave the Throne; even if he could, there was exactly zero chance he was going to listen to some low-ranking priest—or any priest, for that matter. Even if a miracle happened, and the Emperor both could and did leave the Throne at the request of a _priest_ just to come visit some sick “Imperial Trooper”, there was no way that he could get to Ophelia VII in less than a few months, and that was with the fastest Imperial ships fitted with the best warp drives. Mortarion would have plenty of time—

The priest returned within five minutes with the Emperor at his back, and the Emperor was just as healthy as he had been when Mortarion had fought for him during the Great Crusade. Unfettered hate filled Mortarion, and he was briefly thankful for Nurgle’s laughing disease, since it forced him to smile and laugh even as the hate filled his eyes. He could feel the Emperor _see_ him, even through Fulgrim’s fetish, but amazingly he said nothing to the priest beyond “The disease he carries is highly contagious. I’ll be fine, but you won’t be if you stay here much longer.”

The priest bowed, murmured the short form of some prayer—Mortarion saw the Emperor frown and close his eyes but tolerate the action—and left. The moment the door was closed, the Emperor’s eyes flashed with a golden rainbow, along with the entire room a split second later. “No one can enter this room without my knowledge or permission. Everyone outside thinks we’re talking about what one would expect a doctor and his patient to be discussing,” he said. Mortarion didn’t reply, preferring to grit his teeth behind the forced grin. The Emperor pulled a chair over to sit in; it was comically tiny in comparison and shouldn’t have supported his weight, but somehow the metal didn’t protest.

Mortarion’s fists clenched. It would be best if he ripped the fetish off and went straight for the Emperor’s throat; if he threw open his connection to Nurgle, he could pull on the absolute worst plagues his patron had invented and shove them into his creator’s body. Whatever force had gotten him off the Throne couldn’t possibly heal all of them at the same time…but then again, Mortarion needed to know… “How are you here,” he finally managed, after several false starts interrupted by the incessant chuckling.

“I am here in this room because I’m co-locating. There are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of different instances of me scattered throughout the galaxy.” Of course there were. One of Mortarion’s back teeth crunched under the pressure of his grinding, but there was no pain. Only an instant knowledge that the tooth had become infected with a wide variety of diseases. “I am here and not on the Golden Throne because dad came and healed me. Do you remember him?” The question was casual, off-handed, and Mortarion shrugged.

“Doesn’t matter. He probably skipped the whole galaxy the moment he was done with you,” he snarled when the Emperor’s silence demanded a verbal response. “He always preferred you over everyone else anyway. Also he’s a psyker, which means that he’s no better than the rest of the monsters the Warp decided to grace humanity with, and that means he dies along with everyone else so humanity can be free again.”

The Emperor sighed—a heavy, sorrowful noise—and massaged his temples. “I gather you’re including yourself in that statement.” Mortarion didn’t answer, and the Emperor looked past him at the wall for a moment, his eyes briefly turning to a swirling rainbow. “The problem is, even if you did manage to sweep all psykers from existence, humanity would just find some other reason to hate other humans. Skin color, sexual orientation, preferred gender, religion…” He looked back at Mortarion, and his eyes returned to gold. “It’s human nature to pick out minor differences in one another and hate based on those things. Even if you teach them to not hate based on one thing, they’ll start hating based on another, and even then the original hatred lingers under the surface, waiting to rise again.”

“Psychic power that allows a few hundred people to oppress millions isn’t a minor difference!” Mortarion snapped. The fetish’s power flickered for just a moment; some unnamable fluid dripped off Mortarion’s body and onto the table below him, lingering even after the fetish resumed hiding his true shape. “You are blind and hypocritical! Just because you figured out a way to control your power—you can just barge in and force everyone else to conform to what _you_ think is right, no matter what might actually be true! My foster father would be so proud if he’d gotten to know you,” he hissed. “Because those are exactly the ideas that _he_ had, back when he was in power on Barbarus. You’re no different than he is, and in fact, you’re much worse!”

The Emperor waited until Mortarion’s storm of wrath was over. When it was, he closed his eyes—Mortarion briefly saw a glimmer of red in their depths—and drew in a deep breath. “I wished to unite humanity against a coming darkness. Chaos, yes, but also the alien races that threatened to consume and destroy us. There is and has always been a trade-off when it comes to liberty and security; during the Crusade, I needed to take away liberty so I could be assured the people were safe. When I was certain they were—because I had either destroyed or otherwise neutralized the various threats we faced—then I would give those liberties back. It had to be done, else mankind would have been destroyed by thousands of different hands.” He opened his eyes again and looked severely at Mortarion. “I have no doubt that we would have taken a large chunk of the galaxy out with us. We’re stubborn like that. We would have gone down swinging, as the saying goes, and there would hardly be anything left for any successor speies that managed to rise from the ashes of our own destruction.

“The thing is, Mortarion…I was ready to launch my Crusade much earlier than I did. I could have unified Terra millennia before I did; I could even have kept it from falling in the first place. But I didn’t. Instead, I waited. I waited for someone else to see what I was seeing, and to realize what I had realized, and to do something about it. Always worked out that way in the previous…” the Emperor paused, running his thumb over the digits of his left hand and counting with the fingers of his right. “…thirty-five millennia, give or take a few centuries. But it never happened. This time, no one rose to save humanity from itself or the external threats it faced. And then Slaanesh was born and I had. No. Choice.” The Emperor stood up and began to pace. “The thing you fail to understand, Mortarion, is that I never really wanted to be the guy in charge of everything. I tried it a couple times before; it’s not something I enjoy. Give me a nice office where I can make things that benefit everyone, and 

I’m happy. Perturabo and I are similar in that way, I suppose…but that being said, if no one was going to stand up and keep humanity safe, then I fucking was. I rather like humanity, in no small part because of all our flaws, and I would like us to continue another forty millennia.”

He stopped. Turned. There was a definite red ring around his searingly golden irises; Mortarion’s own fury rose to match, but he still said nothing. “But if one is going to be an Emperor. One must pick one’s battles. I decided to wait and tackle the problem of psykers later. There have always been a scattered few humans who could use psychic powers, but they were always less than one percent of the population…right up until the beginning of the Age of Strife, as you know. Here’s the thing: my usual policy? It’s to let humanity play with a new toy and prove they can use it well before I decide what to do about it. Just because it’s new doesn’t mean it’s bad. Barbarus alone didn’t sway me, because that sort of thing has happened before.”

Mortarion cut him off. “Bullshit,” he snarled, ripping the fetish off his neck and casting it to the ground, uncaring of the revelation of his true form, and the sudden influx of power that came with it. “The only people cruel enough to do what the psykers of Barbarus did are psykers!”

“The last time it happened, the difference was based on culture and religion, towards a group of people historically maligned for those things. At the time, humanity had not left its cradle of Terra, though it had begun to dream of such things, and just over two billion people called Terra home,” the Emperor tilted his head to one side, remarkably like a bird of prey. “In one of the more technologically advanced countries, one that had just suffered a terrible war and was in dire economic straits, a group of people rose to power and claimed that their suffering was the fault of that historically maligned group. The members of that group had little power within that country, and had even less as the years passed and their rights were stripped away. It was a slow process, but an insidious one. Slowly, the group in power convinced their followers that their chosen demonized population wasn’t truly human. No one cared when that population was rounded up and segregated. No one cared when they were shipped away in trains to concentration camps. No one cared when those concentration camps became death camps, and most of those sent to them were killed on arrival in poison gas chambers. Almost no one within the country did anything about it…and the rest of the world only cared after the war that our powerful group had started was over, and their deeds came to light.

“At the time we are speaking, there were less than a thousand truly psychic individuals scattered across the world’s surface, and none took part in anything of what I just said. Why? Because they were in hiding, pretending to be normal humans. You want to know the really funny thing? Had the people in power of that country discovered the existence of psykers, they would likely have been among the eleven _million_ killed by the regime. You want to know what else? Everywhere in the galaxy except for Barbarus, that story held true. Anywhere psykers existed, they were rounded up. Then they were either tortured and killed, or they were sent away to planets like Prospero, to live out their lives somewhere very far away from everyone else. Barbarus was an exception, and not an unexpected one.

“When a historically disenfranchised group of people suddenly finds themselves in power—usually by happenstance, as on Barbarus, where psychic gifts were useful for basic survival—they usually turn on those who oppressed them. Give them a taste of their own medicine. See how _they_ like it when _their_ rights are taken away. You know…just like what you want to do with psykers now,” Mortarion snarled; power built in his body, but it gave him pause. It wasn’t Nurgle’s power he was drawing on; this power belonged to someone else. The Emperor was still speaking. “I’m not saying they were right—gods no, they were well over the line—I’m saying their actions were understandable. And besides, you’d already fixed the problem by the time I got there.”

“At which point you stole victory from me. You killed my adoptive father before I could, and took my planet away only to give it back because you couldn’t be bothered to do anything with it!” Mortarion snarled, but didn’t immediately attack; something was different about his body, but he couldn’t quite tell what. “It was my planet by rights! I won it from the necromancers—I killed them and broke their armies, I freed the people from their enslavement, not you!”

“The only reason I intervened was to stop your foster father from killing you. I _meant_ to take him captive, so that you could kill him yourself later…but my rage got the better of me. I am sorry,” the Emperor had stopped pacing, and for a moment, Mortarion was too stunned by the apology to really reply. “I shouldn’t have drawn my sword. Then again, I don’t think I would have stopped with a single punch either…he’d be dead anyway, and we’d still be having this conversation. Do you remember what I asked when you recovered?”

“You wanted to just erase what had happened. As though by physically healing me, you could make everything better and just…delete an unfortunate part of history,” Mortarion hissed. He called his scythe out of the Warp—for some reason it took more effort than usual—and the chittering daemon bound within it begged him to allow it to taste the Emperor’s blood. “Well, I won’t let you.”

“You’re really going to fight me over this?” the Emperor asked. Mortarion snarled at the insane question and readied his scythe for a swing; the daemon gabbled excitement at the coming battle. “Fine. Just a few things before we begin.”

“You’ve had enough time to talk!” Mortarion roared, and started to swing, but the motion wouldn’t complete. His arms wouldn’t obey him, no matter how much Mortarion tried. He tried to step forward, but couldn’t even manage to shuffle; his body was frozen rigid, save for his head. That he could turn, and see that the Emperor was holding up a hand.

“And you haven’t been listening,” he said. “First, you haven’t needed to laugh or smile since I sealed off this room.” Mortarion would have collapsed with the realization had his body been under his control; how had he missed that? “Second, you’ve been instinctively drawing off my power to heal yourself this entire time. You’ve eliminated all but a few dozen diseases from yourself. Quite impressive, considering you had several thousand in you.” Mortarion risked a glance at one of his arms; it did look healthier than before, and there was more flesh there, even if it was still a sickly shade of yellow-green and covered with hard boils. “Third, you could easily switch your allegiance from Nurgle to me if you continue to heal yourself. It would only take a few more seconds, and that’s if I don’t help. Which I won’t do unless you ask.”

“NEVER!” Mortarion howled, panic finally pushing him over the edge of mortal reason. “NEVER AGAIN! I—DON’T—NEED—YOUR—HELP!” Something shattered in his body; he finished his swing, but the Emperor wasn’t there to be harmed. Nurgle’s power flooded back into him, instantly regrowing his wings. Someone shoved the door open—the priest from before—and he was frozen at the sight of the Daemon Prince. Mortarion hurled one of the vials of Faith Eater at his face and fled into the Warp. Once there, he simply ran.

Nurgle would track him down; fine. He was persistent that way, and Mortarion’s punishment would be terrible. He might even have merited transformation into a Chaos Spawn for this. Also fine; it would be a mercy to not have to think. _Is the Emperor right?_ He didn’t want anything the Emperor had said to be true. Normal humans couldn’t possibly have tortured and killed other normal humans over something as stupid as religion…but then again, Lorgar had done that on Colchis. He’d even spoken of it with pride. Of course, Lorgar wasn’t a normal human. He was a Primarch, a scion of the Emperor, and whatever sickness that had made the Emperor conquer most of the known galaxy must have gotten Lorgar too.

But the Emperor had said he didn’t like ruling…and he _had_ made a council of normal humans to run the civil affairs of the Imperium shortly after naming Horus Warmaster. So many of his brothers hadn’t liked that…Mortarion still wasn’t sure what he thought about it. But it did provide evidence for the Emperor’s statement that he didn’t like being the Emperor. And then there was the fact that the Emperor had so rarely smiled, save for when he was in the middle of some usually medical project…he had never smiled on the battlefield, nor when he was settling the political affairs of newly compliant planet. But if he was telling the truth about that…

The ground fell out from under Mortarion’s feet, despite there being no ground anywhere in the Warp to do such a thing. He instinctively unfurled his wings and started flying instead, uncaring of where he was going. The laughter started to bubble up in his chest again, and Mortarion let it swamp him. It gave him something simple to hate. If dad really did come back—no. He wasn’t going to follow that line of thought. If his father really had returned, he was going to ignore Mortarion because he had bigger things to worry about. One of the curses of being a middle child…

 _He did love me just the same._ It didn’t matter. His father always had more important things to worry about, usually whatever his youngest was getting up to. _I was the youngest once._ For a year, and then there was another, and then one after that, and another after that…and then something had happened. No more children, and constantly worrying about the sky. Then they vanished without explanation and never returned. _He would help me if I asked._ It didn’t matter! Mortarion didn’t even need his help, and he’d proven it by helping himself—somehow—by taking the Emperor’s power for his own.

Bits of skin were tearing off midflight, and Mortarion felt nothing. He did not feel his cough return, or his connection to the Warp fail, or the tears in his eyes. He did feel gravity start to suck at him, and he did feel himself fall and find he was unable to catch any air in his wings. When he looked back, his wings were gone, and there were thick trails of dark red blood leaking from his back. An ancient memory stirred somewhere in the back of his mind; once before, this had happened. Then, as now, he fell onto a field of corpses. This time, there was no metallic pod to save him from being broken near to the point of death in the fall.

Just like last time, someone picked him up and carried him away.


End file.
